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Nature in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice (Novel and Film)

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Nature in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice (Novel and Film) Nature in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (novel and film) Xavier Lachazette To cite this version: Xavier Lachazette. Nature in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (novel and film). Journée d’étude : Agrégation d’anglais 2007, Dec 2006, Le Mans, France. hal-03319380 HAL Id: hal-03319380 https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-03319380 Submitted on 12 Aug 2021 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. Xavier Lachazette, Université du Mans – Nature in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice 1 Xavier Lachazette, Université du Mans – Nature in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice 2 Xavier Lachazette, Université du Maine, Le Mans (France) “Nature in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (novel and film)” Plan: INTRODUCTION: Ch. Brontë / Woolf v. Joe Wright on Jane Austen PART ONE: The paucity of natural references in P&P . Limited occurrences of nature-related terms . Scarcity of metaphors & similes . A limited number of descriptions of natural settings PART TWO: Noteworthy exceptions: Aesthetic influences and “Pemberley” . William Gilpin and the Picturesque . An aesthetic conflict in the description of Pemberley . The best of both worlds PART THREE: The romanticizing / Brontification of Jane Austen . “Jane Austen” as a construct . Wright’s Romantic rereading of the novel . Literary vs. cinematic needs CONCLUSION: Lewes‘s criticism of Charlotte Brontë‘s work INTRODUCTION It might seem paradoxical to suggest addressing the topic of nature in a Jane Austen novel. After all, Charlotte Brontë‘s unflattering pronouncement on Austen‘s limits when it comes to natural descriptions still reverberates in our ears. When a friend of hers, George Henry Lewes, the famous essayist and ‗husband‘ of Mary Anne Evans, a.k.a. George Eliot, advised her to start writing less melodramatically than she had done in Jane Eyre, Brontë wrote back, finding fault with Austen‘s style of writing, and indirectly defending her own. The letter, which she wrote to Lewes on January 12th, 1848, goes as follows [QUOTATION 1]: Why do you like Miss Austen so very much? I am puzzled on that point. What induced you to say that you would rather have written Pride and Prejudice or Tom Jones, than any of the Waverley novels? I had not seen Pride and Prejudice till I had read that sentence of yours, and then I got the book. And what did I find? An accurate daguerreotyped [photographed] portrait of a commonplace face; a carefully fenced, highly cultivated garden, with neat borders and delicate flowers; but no glance of a bright vivid physiognomy, no open country, no fresh air, no blue hill, no bonny beck [stream]. I should hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen, in their elegant but confined houses. These observations will probably irritate you, but I shall run the risk1. 1 See http://www.pemberley.com/janeinfo/janeart.html#charlottebronte for this quotation. o . Xavier Lachazette, Université du Mans – Nature in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice For Brontë, Austen‘s work is mostly characterized by unjustifiable, self-imposed limits (she mentions fences, borders, and the lack of open country), and by a narration whose ―careful‖ and ―neat‖ effects prove the writer‘s 3 painstaking approach, but which also damagingly deprives the novel of any ―bright‖ perspective on life and characters by not allowing them to interact with broader, open-air environments. In the next century, in a collection of critical essays on various literary figures entitled Women and Writing, Virginia Woolf voiced a similar, though kinder, take on Austen‘s literary production. For her, Austen‘s limits are indeed apparent in the few ―romantic moments‖ one finds in her novels, a phrase Woolf uses to encompass both moments of passion and natural descriptions. Austen shows signs of emotional evasion, so to speak, in those passages, but Woolf argues that one should accept Austen on her own terms because the little she is able to give in this field is enough to carry the reader‘s conviction [QUOTATION 2]: There were impressions that lay outside her province; emotions that by no stretch or artifice could be properly coated and covered by her own resources. […] She could not throw herself whole-heartedly into a romantic moment. She had all sorts of devices for evading scenes of passion. Nature and its beauties she approached in a sidelong way of her own. She describes a beautiful night without once mentioning the moon. Nevertheless, as we read the few formal phrases about ‗the brilliancy of an unclouded night and the contrast of the deep shade of the woods‘, the night is at once as ‗solemn, and soothing, and lovely‘ as she tells us, quite simply, that it was.‘ (118) One can therefore wonder how the current prevalent view on Jane Austen was born in the first place. How did we get to a situation where the name Jane Austen immediately evokes vague ideas of beauty and romance? How can the collective unconscious be so predisposed to see Austen as a Romantic figure that we are hardly surprised to see moments of visually breathtaking beauty in the latest screen adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, Joe Wright‘s 2005 opus, as when for instance Elizabeth is made to stand at the tip of a Derbyshire, England, rock formation, known as Stannage Edge, to piano and violin music in the background ― such a Romantic scene, by today‘s standards, that we almost expect Leonardo di Caprio to materialize out of the blue and to hear Céline Dion give a voice to the feelings that flutter in the heart of ―Liz on top of the world2‖? It is this strange metamorphosis that I propose to study in this paper. I will start by taking stock of the examples of descriptions of natural scenery that can be found in the novel, with a view not only to laying stress on the paucity of natural descriptions in Pride and Prejudice, but also in order to try and understand the reasons for such an absence, and to assess the potency of the few instances which are actually found. I will then move to the analysis of the only extensive natural description in the novel: Pemberley. Indeed, the description of Darcy‘s mansion strikes the reader‘s imagination powerfully and lastingly with its unaccustomed luxury of natural details, just as it titillates and fascinates the critic‘s mind, unveiling as it does Austen‘s aesthetic influences. Finally I will turn to what in Austen‘s work or elsewhere has allowed the general public, and Joe Wright in particular, to ―Brontify‖ Jane Austen. As we will see, this romanticizing of Austen is not only the logical aftermath of Austen‘s intermediary position in literary and aesthetic schools of thought, but also a sign of the times and a by-product of cinematic needs. PART ONE: The paucity of natural references in Pride and Prejudice . Limited occurrences of nature-related terms It is interesting to notice that, objectively speaking, Pride and Prejudice contains limited amounts of vocabulary related to nature in the shape of trees, flowers, plants, animals, fruits, gardens, weather conditions 2 This is the actual title of the seventh track on the UCJ (Universal Classics) compact disc. Pride and Prejudice: Music from the Motion Picture. Music by Dario Marianelli. Performed by Jean-Yves Thibaudet with The English Chamber Orchestra, 2005. Xavier Lachazette, Université du Mans – Nature in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and landscapes. Word searches conducted in the full-text file of the novel provided by the well-known Website called Gutenberg.org – whose results can be seen in Document A – do not retrieve many occurrences for each 4 nature-related term. Indeed, Pride and Prejudice is a novel in which the sun and moon are never mentioned (if one puts aside the nine occurrences of the word ―Sunday‖), and where the weather is hardly ever discussed, giving the lie to the notion that Britain is the country where passionate debates on atmospheric conditions are rife. In fact, apart from the various balls hosted at Meryton or Netherfield, hardly anything is set at night in the novel – certainly not Lady Catherine de Bourgh‘s unexpected visit at Longbourn, as in the film –, so that the narrative has no need of a moon. A utilitarian view of natural objects and phenomena is therefore suggested: rain is mentioned, and is indeed a key dramatic agent, in Chapter VII when Mrs. Bennet plots to send her eldest daughter to Netherfield Park in hopes that the rage of the elements will detain her there for the night, thus fostering a romantic attachment between Jane and Mr. Bingley. But apart from a reference to ―a succession of rain‖ which keeps the Longbourn lasses indoor, thus preventing their walking to Meryton, sunshine floods the rest of the novel for aught we know. Likewise, all the animals in the novel are solely mentioned in relation to the use to which they can be put: horses and ponies for transportation; trout for fishing; birds, ducks, and partridges for shooting and eating. No dogs are mentioned, but foxhounds, and cats or other domestic animals are nonexistent. It is also striking to see how different a use is made of the wind in Pride and Prejudice on page 106, compared with a very similar episode in the third letter from a previous work, called A Collection of Letters, written before the end of 1792.
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